Animated Short and Feature Films

This is the last genre article and the last article at all before best picture talk! I'm excited. I also just have to finish Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom because - in the interest of full disclosure - no, I didn't actually watch it before writing about its original song (nor had I watched Despicable Me 2). After that, I may or may not watch Alone Yet Not Alone whose nomination was rescinded and The Missing Picture which won't be available for a couple weeks yet. The end is so close I can taste it! Wait, no, that's the lingering taste of candy and energy drinks I've been consuming in high quantities to get through Oscar Quest 2014.

Short Film, Animated:

• Feral
• Get a Horse!
• Mr. Hublot
• Tsukumo (Possessions)
• Room on the Broom

Writing: Adapted and Original Screenplay

Taking a step away from the best films in their genres for a moment, I'll take a look at screenplays. The delay is largely due to Before Midnight which presented a couple of logistical issues. The first being that it was the third film in a trilogy of which I'd not been exposed as of yet. The second being that I had roped someone into watching them with me, so scheduling was a bit trickier. We finished just in time, though, so let's take a look at the screenplay nominees.

Adapted Screenplay:

• Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke for Before Midnight
• Billy Ray for Captain Phillips
• Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope for Philomena
• John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave
• Terence Winter for The Wolf of Wall Street

Foreign Film and Live Action Short

I'm literally beginning to write this post in tears as I deleted over 2,200 words on my two favorite categories. With any luck, analyzing these another time will be more productive than the first time.

Hah.

Anyway, that puts me behind on my already overfull schedule, but I think I can still make it. I had decided to put the short form live action films with the foreign films for a few reasons. Firstly, they're almost all foreign (one is English and from the UK). Secondly, I didn't want to pair them with the best picture nominees as that'd be both a really long post and slightly distracting from the grand finale. So let's get to it. I had the pleasure of catching the short films at the Detroit Film Theater and supposedly you can now see them on demand from iTunes and Amazon. That's not quite as true as they'd have you believe, so you'll have to do a bit of scrounging to find what you may.

The short film nominees:

• Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn’t Me)
• Avant Que de Tout Perdre (Just before Losing Everything)
• Helium
• Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)
• The Voorman Problem

Documentaries: Feature and Short Subject

I start a serious bout of writing that will optimally conclude with the Best Picture article on Saturday. I'm doubling up the short films with their closest feature length category, so, while I'll still be putting out an article a day, I'll be covering ten films instead of five. I'm also going to combine adapted and original screenplay, and best picture of course has nine nominees. Over the next five days, I should be writing about forty-nine films.

What was I thinking when I wrote this schedule?

I had the pleasure of catching the short films in the theater, but many of them are available as of today online, so you're not too late. Maybe.

The nominees for documentary short subject are

• CaveDigger
• Facing Fear
• Karama Has No Walls
• The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
• Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall

Directing

Directing is a category I thought I maybe knew a fair bit about before I started really delving into the technical categories. Now, I feel like I either know way more or way less as I see just how much all those other things are under other players' control. Let's see how this goes. The nominees up are:

• David O. Russell for American Hustle
• Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity
• Alexander Payne for Nebraska
• Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave
• Martin Scorsese for  The Wolf of Wall Street 

Lead Actress

Let's not use the Android app for blogger anymore. It evidently doesn't like me and deleted the beginnings of this post twice. It seems sad to me that for both the men and the women, there's so much overlap in the films that carry lead acting nominations with those that carry supporting acting. I'm more upset here because I saw some roles I definitely thought should be nominated over at least some in the current batch. So who was nominated?

• Amy Adams in American Hustle
• Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine
• Sandra Bullock in Gravity
• Judi Dench in Philomena
• Meryl Streep in August: Osage County

Supporting Actress

I had a beautiful little write-up going along, but the Blogger Android app doesn't save as you go, so bye bye. I have a really hard time writing things twice, but we'll try. It's better than trying to go out to eat in a city that doesn't know what a frickle is! Now that we have the boys out of the way, onto the ladies.

• Sally Hawkins in Blue Jasmine
• Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle
• Lupita Nyong'o in 12 Years a Slave
• Julia Roberts in August: Osage County
• June Squibb in Nebraska